An article in The Bookseller this week offers a really useful overview of the collapse of my erstwhile publisher Unbound from writers' standpoints. It's worth a read.
If you're interested in the story, then this might be of interest too, as might this.
I'm the tiniest of cogs in this particular machine, so I'm not badly (if at all, given modest-to-the-point-of-introverted sales of my last novel) affected, though it was a shame that One In Five - which had a difficult enough journey to publication what with one thing and another (information about this is sketchy and second-hand so I'm naturally cautious to spill any beans here) got caught up in this, and so seems to have been lost as a project.
This is to the extent of subscribers not all having received their copies of the book, which is pretty unforgiveable. I'm chasing this up separately, and I'll report on this when I've got something useful to add. The books do exist (I've been sent a contributor copy, for example) but where they are and why they've not been despatched is at the time of writing a mystery.
I'm aware that e-book subscribers have had theirs, but I'm not aware of any paperbacks having been received. I supported the project too (as I wasn't sure that I'd get a contributor copy) and mine are no-shows thus far.
As for Unbound, a lot has clearly gone wrong including what looks like an awfa lot of chicanery with other people's money. Hopefully those affected (writers who haven't been paid owed royalties, suppliers similarly out of pocket, readers without books) will get redress, and that maybe the Publishing Squad might descend and ask a few legal/criminal questions.
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